Our Voices : Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication

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Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and Communication examines intercultural communication through an array of cultural and personal perspectives, with each of its contributors writing a first person account of his or her experiences in the real world. While most readers are collections of scholarly essays that describe intercultural communication, Our Voices presents short, student-oriented readings chosen with an eye toward engaging the reader. Collectively, the readings tackle the key areas of communication rhetoric, mass communication, and interpersonal communication using a uniquely expansive and humanist perspective that provides a voice to otherwise marginalized members of society. Praised by students for its abundance of short, first person narratives, Our Voices traverses topics as diverse as queer identity, racial discourse in the United States, "survival mechanisms" in Jamaican speech, and codes of communication in nontraditional families.

NEW TO THIS EDITION:

-New essays on the Obama presidency, Osage naming rituals, Muslim feminist perspectives, South Asian Indian women in the workplace, class identity, and the Haitian tragedy in a global context

-Expanded treatment of Arab Americans and the Muslim world

-Reworked coverage of 9/11 to accommodate our most current understanding and scholarship

Empowering and educating students in equal measure, Our Voices is an ideal reader for any intercultural communication course.

"One of the strengths of this book is that it doesn't look at intercultural communication phenomena as 'objectively given', but rather as 'subjectively problematic' by integrating communication theory yet allowing persons to speak in their true cultural voices. If the idea is to create cultural understanding in a way that students from various groups will not tune out from the beginning, certainly the editors of this book took on a daunting task."-C. Thomas Preston, Gainesville State College

"I very much like the approach of this text. The attention to the voices of historically marginalized authors and the use of personal voice, rather than other approaches that have historically Other and silenced us, are important in understanding the goals of this book."-Bernadette Calafell, Syracuse University

"If I can put it this way the realness of this text is its most distinctive feature. In it we read about the struggles, the successes, the challenges, the learning experiences, the joys, and the spiritual uplift and rejuvenation of the authors. We have academic language combined with cultural languages. All of it comes together succinctly to make crucial points regarding our identity. The articles are not too long, either, which is a joy to students, but they provide enough material to get students thinking critically about issues they've either encountered or not."-Patreece Boone, St. Louis University